Best Practices for Data Visualisation

RSS International Conference 2023

Andreas Krause, Nicola Rennie, and Brian Tarran

Welcome

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About the guide

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Why visualise data?

Motivation

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Principles and elements of visualisation

Elements of charts

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Styling charts

What’s wrong with this chart?

Colours

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Annotations

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Fonts

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Alt Text

Alt text (AKA alternative text) is text that describes the visual aspects and purpose of an image – including charts.

Though alt text has various uses, its primary purpose is to aid visually impaired users in interpreting images when the alt text is read aloud by screen readers.

Alt Text

Source: medium.com/nightingale/writing-alt-text-for-data-visualization (Amy Cesal)

Styling for RSS publications

Styling for Significance Magazine

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{RSSthemes} R package

Colour palettes
Base R helper functions
{ggplot2} helper functions

Installation

Installing from GitHub:

remotes::install_github("nrennie/RSSthemes")

Load package:

library(RSSthemes)

Example: plotting with base R

barplot(
  height = table(mtcars$gear),
  col = factor(
    unique(mtcars$gear)
    )
)

set_rss_palette("signif_qual")
barplot(
  height = table(mtcars$gear),
  col = factor(
    unique(mtcars$gear)
    )
)

Example: plotting with ggplot2}

{ggplot2} is an R package that provides functionality for drawing graphics.

install.packages("ggplot2")

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{ggplot2}: basic plot

library(ggplot2)
g <- ggplot(data = mtcars) +
  geom_bar(
    mapping = aes(
      x = cyl,
      fill = factor(vs)
      )
    )
g

{ggplot2}: scales

g +
  scale_fill_rss_d("signif_qual")

{ggplot2}: theme

g +
  scale_fill_rss_d("signif_qual") +
  theme_significance()

Contributing to the guide

Quarto

Quarto is an open-source scientific and technical publishing system that allows you to combine text, images, code, plots, and tables in a fully-reproducible document. Quarto has support for multiple languages including R, Python, Julia, and Observable. It works for a range of output formats such as PDFs, HTML documents, websites, presentations,…

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